This conception of reality, which recognizes the indissoluble link between good and evil, is itself beyond good and evil, and consequently surpasses the visual angles of optimism and pessimism--of optimism that does not discover the evil in life and posits it as illusion, or only as a very small and contingent element, or hopes for a future life (on earth or in heaven) in which evil will be suppressed; and of pessimism, that sees nothing but evil and makes of the world an infinite and eternal spasm of pain, that rends itself internally and generates nothing. It confronts the first with the fact that evil is truly the original sin of reality, ineliminable so long as reality exists, and therefore absolutely ineliminable as a category: the second, with the other category the good, equally ineliminable, for without it evil could not be. And it is easy to show how the optimist declares himself a pessimist, the pessimist an optimist, out of their own mouths. The setting free from individuality and from will, which the pessimist proposes as a radical remedy, is the remedy that reality itself applies at every moment, for we free ourselves from the contradiction of individuality and of wilfulness by the affirmation of the rational will, with which the same pessimist cannot dispense, for the effectuation of his programme of ascesis or of suicide, which, according as it is understood, is either not a programme, or a programme altogether capricious and without universal value. In truth, there is no need to oppose a eulogy of Life with a eulogy of Death, since the eulogy of Life is also a eulogy of Death; for how could we live, if we did not die at every instant? [Sidenote: _Dialectic optimism._] The dialectic conception of reality as development, that is, as a synthesis of being and not-being, can certainly be termed optimistic, but in a very different signification to that of abstract optimism. The synthesis is the thesis enriched with its antithesis, and the thesis is the good, being, not the bad or not-being. But who will wish seriously to oppose this logical consequence? Is it not a fact that men hope and live, although in the midst of their sorrows? Is it not a fact that the world is not ended and does not appear to have any intention of ending? And how would that be possible, if the moment of the good did not prevail, just because the positive prevails upon the negative and Life constantly triumphs over Death? [Sidenote: _Concept of cosmic progress._]